Mr. Phillips’ Warning – Redux

Last September I wrote an article about my high school Journalism teacher, Mr. Robert Phillips.

The point of the story, in case you either missed the article (click here to read it again) or the underlying message, was that even intelligent and well-meaning people sometimes just get things wrong.

The day after President John F. Kennedy was elected, Mr. Phillips made a brief comment to the class before we started our day’s lessons and writing exercises. He warned that the election of a Catholic to the highest office of the country might very well end forever our religious freedoms. His main point was that he wondered what President Kennedy would do if he was given a direct order by the Pope in Rome. Would he obey the head of his church? Or would he make an independent decision based only on what was good for our country.

You’d have to have been there to understand how this was presented to us. Although Mr. Phillips was always able to command our attention, his usual manner was to be soft-spoken and almost casual. That’s the way he began his short – but intense and pointed – little speech to us that morning.

My guess is that thirty minutes after his comments, most of the other students in the class probably forgot about it and went on about their business. For me, however, since I was very much in tune with current events and politics, his words really stuck in my brain – so much so, that I can still conjure up the vision of him standing before the class and hearing his words to this day, nearly fifty years later.

My motivation to write the article about Mr. Phillips was to show that the fear-mongering surrounding the election of President Barack Obama is not something new to this country. It had actually been worse when John Kennedy was elected and Mr. Phillips’ classroom comments at the time illustrated that fact.

In November, I received this very nice email from a very unexpected source:

Wed, November 18, 2009 9:42:57 PM
To: editor@justoneopinion.com

Dear Mr. Hoyle,

I tried to post the following comment to your article mentioning my father Robert Phillips, but, for some reason, the comment couldn’t be submitted. Anyway, here is what I was going to post:

I was Googling my father’s name and found this…[referring to the article published in September]

My father committed suicide in 1990 at age 72 after a lifetime of battling depression. My mother died of cancer in 1972, the year I graduated from North High [Riverside, CA]. Later my dad had a relationship with another woman who also died of cancer. I don’t think he ever recovered from these blows.

Ironically, given your article, he was a staunch atheist who had rebelled against a strict religious background. He was fairly conservative until the Vietnam War, but somewhat radicalized along with my brother Rick (grad – Ramona HS 1968 [Riverside, CA]) and me, and then became extremely cynical about politics in the 1970s, when he told me he agreed with my socialist views and activism in an ideal sense, except he didn’t think anything would ever work to improve our miserable lot.

He was a brilliant man with strong personal ethics, but often very angry and rigid, something his students probably didn’t see. I knew he wasn’t fond of Catholicism, but I didn’t know he singled it out among religions in general – I thought he despised all of them equally.

Millie Phillips, daughter of Bob Phillips

What a pleasant surprise this was for me. Just knowing that an article published in Just One Opinion would connect me with a little girl (all grown up now) that I had met a few times over fifty years ago. Such is the power of the Internet. Over the next few weeks, Millie and I exchanged several emails and got reacquainted.

In part two of this followup to Mr. Phillips’ story, I will share those exchanges with you. I hope you will find them an interesting followup to my original story.